“They’re not. Just let me…”
“You got your face wrong too. It’s actually really normal-sized.”
She stretched as far as she could go, without leaving the bed altogether.
“I can almost…get it…”
“How about now. Can you almost get it now?”
Of course he said the latter as he wrapped one arm around her waist and pinned her to his chest. Which just made the challenge unfair on two fronts—the first being his freakish giant strength. And the second, well…
“Do you have an erection?”
“Of course I have an erection. You’re squirming all over me. Naked.”
She stopped going for the book. Settled into the cradle of his arms instead, breasts pressed to his chest. Legs tangling around one of his impressively solid thighs. All she’d have to do to get a bit of contact on that still pleasantly humming place between her legs was sink down a little.
But somehow she found herself just looking at him. Just looking into his dark eyes, and reveling in the chance to do so. It was what he’d meant by time, she knew—and why a person always needed more of it. What was life without the minutes and hours and days to just stop and stare?
“It was something to wake up with you next to me,” he said, after a long moment. “Just wanted to mark it, you know?”
She nodded, because it was almost exactly what she’d been thinking. If she’d had a pen and a piece of paper she’d have done the same—though the results probably wouldn’t have turned out quite as well as what he then showed her.
The girl in his drawing looked asleep, she thought. She looked as though she’d been asleep for a thousand years, before someone whispered the right words and brought her back to life.
“It’s really lovely, Van,” she said, then cursed herself for not having those same right words to say in return. What if she didn’t wake him up, the way he woke up her? What if she could never draw a picture of him that perfectly showed how beautiful he was?
Because that was what he’d done for her. He’d made her beautiful—hair like a sprawl of leaves and vines, the side of her face a soft slant in the light he’d made happen on the page.
“Don’t be sad,” he said, but she couldn’t help it. She had to go find some place else to live, now, and knew it. You couldn’t just live in something like this, forever. There wasn’t a forever. Forever had bills she couldn’t pay for and food she had no right to eat. Jobs she wasn’t qualified for, support she couldn’t offer.
“I’m not. I’m just…glad that we’ve had this time together.”
He shifted then, until she had no choice but to lever herself back onto the bed. It wasn’t a cold move, however—far from it. As he swung off the windowsill and reached for the jeans he’d left on something that might once have been a wicker chair, he said things.
Things that should have been reassuring.
“Well, there’s plenty more where that came from.” She watched him button and belt the clothes, once they were on. “I was thinking we could go to the gallery today—or is that too much like something I want to do? Man, I bet you’ve got a million things you need to see right now.”
She thought of them all in a quick succession—a coffee house, a book store, the nearest movie theatre immediately.
“Van…”
“So think about it, while I get breakfast.”
“Van,” she said, more firmly.
He wasn’t listening, however. Or more, he was listening. He just didn’t want to hear it. He knew the words about bills and jobs and support were coming, and didn’t want to hear them.
“What do you want? Eggs? A bagel?”
He stopped in the middle of his room, t-shirt half on, half off. A look on his face that told her she was right. He understood what she was going to say, for sure.
“How am I going to pay for eggs and a bagel, Van? I don’t even know what eggs and a bagel cost. The last time my parents took me out to dinner we went to the orphanage Oliver Twist lived in, and I had gruel.”
He glanced away, expression somewhere between amused and disbelieving.
“How do you even come up with this stuff, seriously?”
“What stuff?”
“The Oliver Twist stuff… God, I don’t even know how you still have a sense of humor.”
“I don’t. That was deadly serious.”
His eyes sparked bright. She had to say—she lived for that light in his eyes.
“Evie, listen—” he started, but she cut him off.
“I can’t just live here, Van. I can’t. You know I can’t. What would I contribute? What can I give to you? I—”